It's the endgame content. Once you've gotten as good as you can get, it gets boring. In shooters, once you've memorized the levels and have a best gun and best loadout, the game becomes routine. Go to this corner, throw a grenade, come out shooting, duck back, hide in this bush. After time, everyone starts using the same tactics and it stops being fun. For other games like MMOs (WoW, GW2, etc), once you've beaten the main content of the game there may not be anything left to do. Just more of the same, or competitive PvP play that has the same problem as the shooters I was talking about.
Once you've seen everything the game has to offer, it starts getting boring quickly. Like watching the same movie over and over. Some you can watch over and over because they're that good, some you watch once or twice and you're done.
Now to your question of it being too hard to beat good players in an older game, that does have an effect. You might find it difficult to get into Counter Strike or Team Fortress 2 these days because the people still playing are really, really good. They've been playing the same game for a decade.
> In shooters, once you've memorized the levels and have a best gun and best loadout, the game becomes routine. Go to this corner, throw a grenade, come out shooting, duck back, hide in this bush. After time, everyone starts using the same tactics and it stops being fun.
This is then considered the "meta", most efficient tactic available, and in some communities, it will be heavily frowned upon to deviate from the established meta as that's seen as "throwing the match".
That's why a lot of multiplayer games are really fun right after release: Most players are new with no clue what they are doing, everybody is enjoying themselves even if they are messing up, they are still having fun exploring how everything works.
But as communities mature, and more people understand the mechanics at play and how best to exploit them to their gain, the community becomes more "mature" and competitive. Which is completely at odds with "messing around for fun", a process most new players learn by.
100% this. It's about replayabiliy. Some games have it in spades as the game elements involve interacting with other players making each play through experience somewhat unique. Others are very dull to play again. Single player offline games are quite rare these days for this reason, the last big one I can think of was half life 2.
There are plenty of very successful single player games these days... but exactly like you said, they tend to involve the player interacting in unique ways to make the experience more varied. Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, Elder Scrolls games, Far Cry and Just Cause. Even Mario and Legend of Zelda have gone this route. Linear story-driven single player games are niche, but open world, player-driven, interactive, "radiant AI" style games bring the feeling of a living multiplayer world to the single player experience.
Once you've seen everything the game has to offer, it starts getting boring quickly. Like watching the same movie over and over. Some you can watch over and over because they're that good, some you watch once or twice and you're done.
Now to your question of it being too hard to beat good players in an older game, that does have an effect. You might find it difficult to get into Counter Strike or Team Fortress 2 these days because the people still playing are really, really good. They've been playing the same game for a decade.